Pittsburgh residents who want to build a deck, install a fence or complete other residential construction work must file for the permits to do so online. But City Councilor Bob Charland Tuesday urged Mayor Ed Gainey to simplify a complicated process by making permit applications available to file in person.
In order to correctly complete permit applications today, “you need to have a lot of proficiency at the internet,” Charland said. “That is not serving all of our constituents well.”
The city hasn’t had a physical location to file permit or planning applications since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sent many city employees to work from home. But while much of the city’s workforce has returned to the office since then, most staff at departments like City Planning still work remotely. That’s because their old offices along Ross Street were abandoned in preparation for moving into a new office at 412 Boulevard of the Allies.
Then-mayor Bill Peduto narrowly won City Council's approval in 2018 to purchase that building for $40 million. The goal was to create a “one stop shop” for city services, with the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Housing Authority moving in as well.
But five years later, the building remains half empty. And according to the controller's office, the city has spent nearly $10 million to renovate and manage the building, bringing the total cost so far to roughly $50 million.
The city has blamed unspecified construction delays. But those delays have seemingly only affected city departments: The URA and Housing Authority settled in well over a year ago.
“It continues to be an embarrassment that the URA and the Housing Authority have moved into these spaces almost two years before city agencies have been able to,” Charland said.
Charland said he had heard the delays were “furniture-related,” but could not elaborate specifically on what the issue was. “There seems to be continued delays for the more cosmetic build-out inside the building,” he said.
On Tuesday Charland proposed a non-binding "will of council" that urges the city to offer an in-person option for permit applications at least one business day each week. The statement says that the city needed to make “local government more accessible to its residents and be more friendly to new construction to meet growing housing demands.”
Charland told WESA that until the new facility is ready, there are several locations where the city could operate such a desk, including a teller window at the Finance Department located at the City-County Building.
A will of council does not compel the mayor to act. Charland hopes bringing attention to the issue will prompt Gainey to do so. But judging from the response from the mayor's office on Tuesday, an interim location seems unlikely.
“Mayor Gainey agrees with Councilman Charland that reopening in-person permitting is the next critical step to delivering a modern, applicant-friendly permitting process," said mayoral spokesperson Maria Montaño. But opening a temporary office "would actually delay, rather than accelerate, reaching by pulling staff and resources away from the ongoing work of launching the new One-Stop permitting counter at 412 Blvd. of the Allies."
Montaño said the city was on track to have operations at that location up and running this year. But she didn't provide an estimated timeline for when that would happen, and the office did not respond to questions about what construction delays have prevented it from taking place already.
Charland said that the absence of clarity underscores the need for a more immediate fix.
“The situation has become more pressing," he said. "We really need to get a physical location opened up for permitting through the city."
Charland is not the only council member questioning the status of the building. Councilor Deb Gross, who has long been critical of the city’s acquisition of the property, referred to it as a “$40 million boondoggle.”
Gross noted there was contention surrounding the decision to purchase the building rather than renovate 200 Ross Street, a former steel company headquarters that previously had housed city offices.
“If [412 Boulevard of the Allies] was such a great office building, why did we pay so much money to have people not move into it?” Gross said.
She noted that the city’s Planning Commission, which previously held public meetings in the Ross Street facility, has had to use City Council chambers instead.
The city's syringe services initiative has also been affected by the lack of progress. A Second Avenue site approved by the County to serve as a syringe distribution center can't open until public works employees currently using the site move out.
Gross recently voted against a measure to pay an additional $142,740 for architectural and design services for the building. She said the city has paid roughly $400,000 a year “for property management at a building that we're not even occupying our share of." Spending more money without having a timeline for when city workers could move in, she said, would be like “throwing money into a money pit.”
Montaño argued the city has been able to process more applications online than it did prior to 2019. And she contended that despite office opening delays, work is already underway to prepare staff to serve residents in person.
The city, she said, has "been working aggressively for the past two-and-a-half years to not just re-open an in-person permitting counter, but to do so in a way that fundamentally improves the permitting experience [and]' facilitates investments."
